This blog is a space for me to rant in that most seventeenth-century sense of the word; and to cut and paste the ideas and comments that don't seem to fit in more traditional forms of academic publication.

Friday, 20 January 2017

What follows is the lightly revised text of a 'Provocation' I presented at the launch event held to celebrate the creation of the Digital Humanities Institute from the Humanities Research Institute. Held in Sheffield on the 17th of January 2017, the event perhaps required more celebration than critique (and the DHI deserves to be celebrated). But I hope that the main point - that we need to move beyond the textual humanities to something more ambitious - comes through in what follows.

I have been
working with what has up till now been the Humanities Research Institute for
almost twenty years. I have witnessed as it has
grown with each project, and engaged with each new twist and turn in that
remarkable story of the evolution of the digital humanities in the UK since the
1990s. It has been a real privilege.

Of all the centres created in the UK in that time – the HRI has been the most
successful, and most influential. And it
has been successful, because, more than any other equivalent it has created a sustainable
model of online publishing of complex inherited materials, and done so in
delicate balance with an ongoing exploration of the new things that can be done
with each new technology – and in balance again with a recognition of the new
problems the online presents.

I frequently
claim that the UK is at the forefront of the digital humanities – not
necessarily because the UK has been at the bleeding edge of technical
innovation; or because its academics have won many of the intemperate arguments
that pre-occupy critical theory.
Instead, it is at the forefront of worldwide developments because,
following the HRI, the UK figured out early that the inexorable move to the
online, both demanded a clarity of purpose, and a constant and ongoing
commitment to sustainable publication.
The HRI, and now the DHI, represent that clear and unambiguous
commitment to putting high quality materials online in an academically credible
form; and an equally unambiguous commitment to measured innovation in search
and retrieval, representation, and analysis.

But, while
it is a moment to look back on a remarkable achievement, it is also a moment to
grasp the nettle of change. This re-foundation
is a clear marker of that necessity and reflects a recognition both that the Humanities
as a whole are on the move, and that the roles the DHI might play in that
process are themselves changing.

For me, this sets a fundamental challenge. And where I
tend to start is with that label ‘The Humanities’. This category of knowing has never really sat very comfortably
for me. It has always seemed a
rather absurd, portmanteau import from the land of Trump – a kind of Trumpery –
used to give a sense of identity to the thousand small private Universities
that pock-mark the US; and to a collection of ill-assorted sub-disciplines brought together primarily in defence of their funding. And it goes without saying, ‘The Humanities’ are
always in crisis.

But, if you
asked me to define the ‘humanities’ part of that equally awkward phrase – the
Digital Humanities – it has to encompass that process through which a society
learns about itself; where it re-affirms its collective identity and
values; where the past and the present
work in dialogue. And whether that is
via history, or literature, philosophy or politics, or the cultural components
of geography and sociology – the ‘Humanities’ is where a community is first
created and then constantly redefined in argument with itself, and with its
past.

For all
the addition of the ‘digital’ to the equation, that underlying
purpose remains, and remains uniquely significant to
a working civil society.

But, up
until now – that conversation – that dialogue between the past and the present
– has pre-eminently taken the form of text – the texts of history books and
novels; long analytical articles and essays; aphorisms, poems and manifestos. And even when you add the ‘digital’ to create
the ‘Digital Humanities’, the dominance of ‘text’ remains constant. Indeed, if you look at the projects that have
been undertaken by the HRI over the last two decades, the vast majority have
been about text, and the re-representation of inherited text in a new digital
format. You can, of course, point to
mapping projects, and 3d modelling of historic buildings, but the core work of
the ‘digital humanities’ to date has been taking inherited text, and making it
newly available for search and analysis as a single encoded stream of data.

This is a fantastic thing – the digital humanities have given us new access to old text; and
created several news forms of ‘reading’ along the way – distant, close, and
everywhere in between. It has arguably,
created a newly democratic world of knowledge – in which some 40% of all humans
have access to the web and all the knowledge contained therein – all 3.5 billion of them.
That small-minded world many of us grew up in, of Encyclopaedia salesmen peddling access to
a world of information most of us were otherwise excluded from by class and race and gender – is simply
gone. This is a very good thing.

But, while the first twenty years of the web forms a place where
the stuff of the post-enlightenment dead needed to find a home; our hard work
recreating this body of material also means that we have spent the last twenty
years very much swimming against the tide of the ‘humanities’ as a set of
contemporary practises. We have
reproduced an old-school library, but online – with better finding aids and
notetaking facilities, and we have made it
more democratic and hyper-available – for all the paywalls in the world. But at the
same time, we have also allowed ourselves to limit that project to a ‘textual’
humanities; when the civic and civil conversation that the ‘humanities’ must
represent, has itself moved from text to sound and from sound to image. There is a sense in which we are desperately
trying to represent a community – a conversation – made up of an ever changing
collection of voices in an ever changing series of formats, but trying to do
so, via that single encoded stream of knowing:
text.

This is
where the greatest danger and the greatest opportunity for the ‘digital humanities’
lies – because if you look at ‘data’ in its most abstract forms, this equation
between knowing and text, is breaking down, and is certainly changing at a dramatic
pace.

The greatest
technological developments shaping the cultures of the twentieth century focussed
on creating alternatives to text.
Whether you look to sound and voice, via radio and recording; or image
and movement, via film and television – the first half of the twentieth century
created a series of new forms of aural and visual engagement that gave to sound
and image, the same universal reach that for the preceding four hundred years, was
provided by print. The second half
of the twentieth century, and the first decade of the twenty-first, was equally
taken up with putting sound and image in our everyday - jostling for
attention, and pushing aside – text.

It is
perhaps difficult to remember that the car radio only became commonplace in the
1950s; and that the transistor radio making mobile music possible – on the
beach and on the street – was a product of the same decade. Instant photography and moving
images were similarly, only given freedom to go walkabout in the 1970s and 1980s,
with luggable televisions, and backbreaking video cameras.

This trajectory of change – and ever greater focus on the non-textual – has simply increased in pace with the advent of
the smart phone and the tablet. While at
the margins, the Kindle may have changed how we read Fifty Shades of Grey on
public transport; it was the Walkman, the iPod, and the smartphone that have most
fundamentally changed how we spend our time - what kinds of signals we are
interpreting from minute to minute. The most powerful developments of the last
decade have involved maps and images – from Google Earth to Flickr and
PinInterest.

Ironically,
while the book and the journal article have remained stubbornly the same - even
in their digital forms; and while much of ‘digital humanities’ efforts have
been directed towards capturing a technology of text that had been largely
invented by 1600, and remained largely unchanged since; the content of our
culture has been radically transformed by the creation of unlimited sound and
image.

If you
want proof of this, all you need do reflect on the triggers of your
imagination when contemplating the 1960s or 1980s – or the 2000s or 2010s. We have become a world of sound and image.

Half the time we now narrate the past through
discographies of popular music; and most of what we know about the past is
delivered via image rich documentaries, and historical dramatizations – wholly
dependent on film archives for their power and claim to authenticity. Our conversation – that dialogue with the
dead, that forms the core of the humanities – has become increasingly
multi-modal; and multi-valiant. A simple
measure of this – is that the percentage of text on the web has been declining
steadily since the mid-2000s. According
to Anthony Cociolo, text currently represents only some 27% of web content.

Over the last two decades the Digital Humanities has crafted a technology for the representation of text; but we now need to pay more attention to all that other
data – the non-textual materials that increasingly comprise our cultural
legacy, and the content of our humanities conversation.

And the digital humanities have a genuine opportunity to create
something exponentially more powerful than the textual humanities. What the digital side of all this allows, is the removal of the barriers between sound and image and text – between novel,
song and oil painting. Each of these is
no more than just another variety of signal – of encoding – now, in the
digital, divided one from the other by nothing more substantial than a
different file format.

If we
can multiply sound by text – give each encoded word a further aural inflection;
and each sound a textual representation of its meaning to the listener – we
make the humanities stronger and more powerful.
By bringing text and image together; we create
something that allows new forms of analysis, new layers of complexity, and new
doubts and claims, to be heard among the whispering voices of that humanities
conversation. In part, this is a simple
recognition that the physical heft of a book, changes how you read it; and that
doing so on a crowded tube train, is different from reading even the very same physical
book on a sunny beach.

Much has
already been done to bring all these signals on to the same screen – to map
texts; and add image to commentary; but there is an opportunity to go much
further with this, and to acknowledge in a methodologically consistent way, that we can use
sound and image, place, space and all the recoverable contexts of human
experience to generate a more powerful, empathetic understanding of the past;
to have a fuller more compelling conversation with the dead. To my mind, we need new methodologies that
allow us to analyse and deconstruct multiple signals, multiple data streams –
sound multiplied by text by image by space.
We need to recreate the humanities by multiplying its various strands, one against the
other, to create something more powerful, more challenging, and more
compelling. Perhaps, the Humanities3.